Last Flame
by a vestige of peace
Summary: It was an accident, but she is glad. So she sits on top of the tower, and tries to reach across the chasm while he watches her with a broken heart, caught in the shards of glacial eyes. D/G Roughly following the 6th book.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer: All the characters and settings in this work belong to JK Rowling and related franchise owners of Harry Potter. **

_No one would listen  
No one but her  
Heard as the outcast hears_

Phantom of the Opera, film.

**I**

It was another one of those nights. The moon shone icy and unblinking from her solitary perch. The feeble cast of the stars sent the darkness below whispering. Night and demons swirled- _waiting-_ through the field of treetops, with no sound but the rhythmic rush of a thousand leaves, as the Forbidden Forest breathed out in its dreadful slumber.

A cool breeze twined around Ginny's legs, fluttering the ends of her shirt and snaked up underneath to circle her waist. She shivered where she sat on Tower's ledge, but managed to remain still, afraid that she might tip and tumble soundlessly into the arms the forest. Closing her eyes against it, Ginny felt the air inflate the flannel material of her pajamas and flap the edges against her sides, playfully. Ginny felt its effort wasted as the icy caress traced flinching bumps, traveling up her rigid spine like long bony fingers and awoke, instead, the biting chill of unforgettable memories.

_Tom._

Bundling the comforter that she had dragged out of the dormitory firmly, Ginny tried to make herself as small as possible inside the worn quilt. Curling her toes inside frayed slippers, Ginny shuddered out a long breath, closed her eyes again, and prayed that the peering eyes in the darkness below would not reach her up here.

-\|/-

Draco crushed the rich, crackling parchment into a ball in his fist, bursting through the empty common room, and out to the stony corridor. Almost instantly, the warmth of his bed, and the fire crackling in the dormitory fled from his skin and he was left with such a cramping cold that he wondered if he had not been turned into one of the stones.

_Some things are worse than death. _

Squeezing on the now hard ball of paper in his hand, the forming points stabbing into the soft flesh of his palm, Draco stalked through the hallways blindly, a helpless anger buzzing through his veins. His head hurt, and the unrelenting toll of too long without sleep beat incessantly against the backs of his eyeballs.

He was so _tired._

He felt translucent; like the crumpling, expensive letter in his hands, he felt like a shell with no substance left. Well dressed and well fed, perhaps, but what was survival without the promise of tomorrow?

_Without the promise of death. _

It was that prospect of tomorrow that plagued Draco. _Love, son, duty, pureblood, right, wrong; _all of these took on a new meaning without the security of tomorrow.

Instead, Draco was leashed to Today, and the ugly immediacy of the present. With one mark, he had become reduced from boy to creature, from son to progeny. From pureblood wizard to disposable soldier.

And yet, the letters continued to arrive, filled with loving lies: _Love, son, duty, pureblood, right, wrong._ There was so much tucked into these words, so much darkness, anger and pride that Draco could not recognize them anymore. The letters, the well crafted words, the dreams; the waking, living nightmare; the dull, unrelenting ache in his forearm spoke to him, each in their own tenor. Requests and commands wound together, forming a vice around his limbs. Although similar in political cause, these commands were laced with silent requests—pleas—while the requests ran with the terrible current of threat. Family for honor, and cowardice for family.

_Some things are worse than death. _

Draco dreamed of silence.

The world around him had expanded and taken on monstrous dimensions while he had been lost in his childhood it seemed, and now he awoke to find no one he recognized. Those nights when he would sneak to the Quidditch pitch to graze the starry skies seemed far away and absurd now. The many memories of sneaking into Hogsmead for a drink, or climbing up dusty towers in the castle for a snog now felt alien. The pride that once resided on the clouds above them now rained like a river on him, each drop condemning him a little more.

Drops of hope, drops of fear, drops of whiskey, cathartic cruelty and blood. But no matter how many others he tried to beat down around him—to try and eek out the same relish that his father and his friends enjoyed— to feel it's empowering sweetness on his own tongue, Draco's anxiety remained. Instead of empowering him, the sweet tastes of his expended fury turned dry and bitter in his mouth.

With each reminding letter from his father in Azkaban, of what he must do, the layers of futility continued to roil and plunge him.

He dreamed of peace.

But if there was one thing that his father's new guests at home had taught Draco over the past couple of summers, it was that people endured: they lived on, kept walking and breathing, even after their very souls were lit aflame.

People endured. And they didn't seem to be able to help themselves. They went insane; they broke a little inside, every day—but they endured.

And the thought, deceptively, was not comforting at all. Indeed, there were worse things than death.

When he had first watched his father casting the Cruciatus curse on the mudblood collected from Diagon Alley, Draco had been rooted by the man's gasping, his twitching, his screams. Frothing at the mouth, the keening voice that had burst from his jowls had seemed to come from somewhere deep inside him- some small endless space where even the Cruciatus could not reach.

It had grated on Draco's ears, stinging through his eyes until watery rivulets of the man's agony ran down Draco's face.

He had expected the man to die at any moment, so he had continued watching, unblinking grey eyes fixed-

\- _as if that was something he could do- to witness the pain without flinching, and be there. To learn. _

Draco had not thought a person so exhausted could go on for so long, but the man had not stopped. The noise echoed on, bouncing on the tall glass windows, breaking through the wooden hinges of rosewood doors, and collecting, ringing, in the hollowed domes of patrician ceilings all through the mansion.

He had kept screaming; shrieking and clawing and begging—"_mercy!"—_ until Draco had wanted to scream with him- to tell him to _shut __the fuck __up_!, to give up, give in, stop twitching, stop enduring, stop it stop stop stopstopstopstop-

He had wanted to scream at his father to just kill him.

But he didn't. And neither did the man.

Draco had sat there for the whole thing. He had watched intently, his teeth clamped on the inside of his cheek until little dents of copper lined there. And everything- the piles of gold inside his Gringott's vault; the closets of fine robes; the lusty eyes of his peers and friends, all the vain, blinded pleasures of his world had come to mean nothing, all at once.

He had learned the insubstantial quality of privilege. When circumstances turned, they were all victims of the same fear. And he feared the Cruciatus Curse all the more when he heard the screams of the next one, and the one after that, and the next.

And it was like a cold, stabbing realization, a dawning, immovable fear of a world that has no end.

Wrestling with burdens too heavy for him, Draco stepped onto the moving staircase that landed before him without thinking.

On silent feet, he moved up towards the sky.

-\|/-

Nothing could get her here. Underneath the open, infinite sky, in the perpetual freedom of the limited, precious hours in the unbounded air, Ginny was safer than at any other time.

There were no nooks, no crannies up here for demons to lurk in. Here, at the top of the tower, there was no enclosure where they could corner her. Beneath the cool, inhuman touch of the watchful stars, there was no Tom, no evil.

Because, surely, with _so much _night, so _much_ darkness, there could be no room for the excess of _his_ darkness. Surely, here, in the cool peace of complete and perfect night; with its pinprick lights, and its chilling, endless breeze- she was secure.

Up here, she could not feel the dead clay weight that hung in her stomach every day. There was no morbid clench in her spirit, staining her inside out.

Here, where she could step over, dive to an end, nothing would chase her.

So instead, scaling the cramped castle walls, full of a hundred thousand memories, Ginny crouched every night at the top of the world and reveled at the blotting blackness that sheltered her from the onslaught of the world. Holding her breath, she imagined herself disappearing, hidden from not only the view, but the thoughts of everybody, until there was nothing left to mourn.

Just the shell of a fifteen year old girl, her lungs filled with ink.

When the moon was black, Ginny would think, surely this was the closest she could ever get to death before she died. She would close her eyes, and the wind would curl and sway around her, making her a part of the endless of sky, teasing her like a leaf caught in a breeze.

And, smiling, in its unstopping, constant breath, Ginny would hear it whispering to her that nothing could get her here.

She was safe.

Cold, vulnerable, and always on the verge of tipping over— but safe.

**a/n: Please drop me a line in the "review" section.**


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer: All names and places belong to JK Rowling. **

_And if the darkness is to keep us apart  
And if the daylight feels like it's a long way off  
And if your glass heart should crack  
And for a second you turn back  
Oh no, be strong_ -"Walk on" U2

**II**

As he prepared to step off the ledge, Draco caught a flash of fire.

The night closed behind him, and the dark was clotted and soft on his skin, getting in his mouth, twisting over his tongue and seeped into his lungs. And in it, the flare of shadowed red stood out: a torch full of hope, beckoning the return of the sun.

Immediately, he took a step back. Where but a moment ago the sheer drop off the ledge had shimmered alluringly, it darkened and deepened now. A small flicker of fear sparked inside his beaten soul, and Draco looked closer at the waving, valiant streak across the sky.

The wind swirled in a furious spurt once more and the trailing locks got caught by its lashing- first forward and then curling, and turning, it whipped a thick lock away to reveal a pale, freckled shadow against the black night.

Draco took a step forward again, and stared.

It was the littlest Weasley.

Furrowing brows, head tilting, he wondered at the irony of his skirting sleep leading him to her of all people: the last soldier beyond the enemy's lines; the straggling, valiant tail of the losing side.

Draco felt his mouth twist bitterly-

_-Like bright red hair that streamed unbound, fighting the blotting darkness of the night._

Tilting his head, Draco thought, _and what do _you_ hide from up here, little Weasel? When all your life is unwrapped for you, and given to do with what you will?_

And just as he had finished the thought, her head turned slightly, and the shifting shadows of her hair moved from her eyes, and he saw her looking straight at him.

Dark eyes staring into silver, she curled her sadness around his question and squeezed it until he shied at his own audacity. Draco swallowed, and stared at her unwavering eyes, unable to move.

_Caught._

It was as if she had forged something between them in that moment, with her silent eyes and misted breath. Caught unawares, Draco caught the impact of her gaze like a fist in the diaphragm- wishing, crumbling, uncloaked silver eyes widened, and before he could stop, with a intake of breath, she entered into his life.

Her sad gaze felt like a raw festering wound; like a thousand loving lies on his soul. The wind ripped through his clothing, tossing her breath across the expanse between them, and Draco almost turned his face to it, almost closed his eyes and vanished into the shadows of his own hurts.

But her blazing, coiling head of flames kept him rooted, with his head held up, over the waters.

In the dim, misty hue of the moonlight, it looked remote, tamed to a darker red; still burning; still fighting, but somehow subdued. Valiant. Like the first bright light of dawn, it soothed his eyes, shining like a small beacon of beauty in a void, dreary world.

And randomly, he remembered the last lines of an old knight's tale- "and when the war was ended, there was nothing but a sea of losers everywhere."

As he stared at her unruly locks, the humming fight ground beneath his anger and self-pity took a hesitant breath, and spread through his chest like hot water. Draco swallowed and looked away, turning to leave. When he glanced back again, the fire was cooled by her unwavering gaze, and instead he felt a string of longing catch against his feet, holding him still.

_:::-:::_

She had felt him there before she had actually seen him. Like a fallen star, from the corner of her eye, she saw him land on the dark slate of the castle's highest tower.

She saw him take a step towards the lip of the ledge, and she said nothing. Tom had taught her about secrets, and she had learned enough to never look into one again.

What people did under the cover of darkness was what they did not want others to see. She hid on top of a tower from a dead spirit, and he wanted to take his life back from whoever had taken possession of it. He could keep what secrets he liked; she would not look.

But then a bold wind had snaked through her throat and flipped out her frozen hair from the blanket that held it against her back. A rush of streaming russet, browns and gold and hot, bleeding red had blocked her peripheral vision for a moment. When it had tumbled down and whipped away again, he had stepped back.

He had seen her.

From beneath the shadow of a moving stray of hair Ginny flicked a quick glance- hoping to sneak one look, to snatch back her small stolen secret.

The air that was entering her mouth had choked in her throat.

Returning her widened gaze back to the shivering forest, Ginny felt the image of a forlorn Draco Malfoy brand itself behind her lids.

She felt his bright eyes looking at her. Feeling a trail of confusion coiling inside her stomach, she saw his expression without looking: a broken heart caught in the blunt shards of glacial irises.

Maybe he was accusing her of not doing anything.

Maybe he hated her interrupting.

Or maybe, he blamed her for his own lack of resolve; for the trembling in his knees before they should have unlocked and he had let the shadows catch him at last.

His gaze burned through the flying curtain of her hair, coating layers of dirty blame on the phantom lines in the corners of her eyes.

The angry shadows at the base of the tower stretched to catch her by her weighing guilt.

Sighing in resignation, Ginny had turned at last, resting clear, sleepless eyes on him. Brows crinkling in uncertainty, she had wondered if she felt peeved or hurt. So without thinking, without remorse, she whispered into the night: "And what chases the son of a death eater?"

_Why are _you _here?_

Even from the distance she could see his pale eyes flashing in the moonlight, so full of cracks and fissures that she wondered how she had never noticed before.

He was so different from everything around him, so different from incorporeal black hair; dark eyes; cold, remorseless gaze that still crept at her through the fogged channel of too many years. Against the gloom of her memories, he was breaking light right after the curtain was drawn. He was moonlight; whites and silvers and pale hues of gold churned with the sharp shade of ether found only on the glinting surface of the ocean.

He was so luminescent that, in the dark, it hurt to look at him.

Fighting a wince, Ginny waited.

But immobile, and cut from moonstones, he did not answer her. Standing against the blackness that threatened to extinguish him, he looked lost and alone and she felt something achingly familiar in his stance. Gazing shamelessly from her solitary perch, Ginny looked at him anew, curiosity buzzing through her as she saw someone she had never met in the day light before. Six years, and in one accidental instant, she caught sight of him with all his guards dropped.

She felt like crying.

He said nothing, except for the naked hurt in his eyes. She knew that stance: shoulders stiff, fingers curled into loose fists, jaw taunt. It was the look of one chained. And though his shackles were invisible, he was not.

After all, stars could not hide in the night. His glow was dying.

Suddenly, she was eleven, all alone, and clean again; free for a moment from the vice like grip of obsession. Up here in this unfeeling, untouched realm of refuge, she stared into his unblinking eyes, allowing her own guard to go down.

And looking at the Slytherin head-boy, his aristocratic flame glimmering on the astronomy tower in the distance, Ginny realized that- for now- he was none of what he pretended either. Not now, not here. Not looking like that, with the broken, haunted gloom around him.

He was just a boy. A boy, with far too much armor.

Looking away at last, Ginny sighed, pushing the image of him into that tiny bottle where she kept all of _her _secrets, and breathed in the calm of the silence, unconsciously polishing a leather-bound memory of another boy, who had never felt any pain.

_-\|/-_

_"And what chases the son of a death eater?_"

He did not need to hear it, but he could feel the question wrought in contempt fogging the air around him, every day. He felt it stoppering his lungs, squeezing his chest, pushing against his back, his legs, his arm. And he really did not need to hear it.

But he heard her. Her whisper was small, and light as the flutter of a butterfly's wings, but it carried through the clear boundless air between them, and curled around his heart.

_The death Eater, of course_, he wanted to answer. _The son's father; the man with the staff who you fear from your patchy homes afar. Inside closed walls, through green ink, he chases with a curt whispery voice, a hooked staff, a bottle of brandy a spell a hex an oath a green green snake that aches and aches_\- But, the words stuck in his throat.

Looking at her lone, vulnerable frame, he felt the tumbling answers dribble and run dry. The cool breeze still flowed through her hair, lifting and releasing the fiery tresses and Draco imagined it slipping through her legs and catching her from her brick seat and lifting her away to float in the cold darkness like a lone autumn leaf.

He did not answer her because _surely_, she knew.

Surely she knew how it felt to be chased, to always be running. Until she was twisted and tangled into tiny knots, clamping it all behind her lips, never to tell anyone what they could not hear; what could not be told- screaming inside her own head for someone to notice- someone to see. And to always feel the truth slash at her insides a little more; until she was a little less with each passing night.

Of course she knew. The only Weasley of her kind.

Because there was only one way that the haunted looked: knees curled into chest, arms still and clenched, always cold and always hiding.

And she was here, wasn't she? She was hiding from the walls and the high ceilings and tight little corners on the top of a tower, wasn't she? A flickering flame, wondering which breath was its last: teetering at the edge of the world.

Draco felt her sigh rustle with the wind in his hair as her eyes slipped away from his once more. He saw the apology printed across her face, weighing down on the drapes of her suddenly subdued red hair. And Draco felt the latch holding him in place ease, and let him go.

He wondered if the world had suddenly changed.

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	3. Chapter 3

**DISCLAIMER: I do not own Harry Potter. **

_You dance inside my chest,__  
__where no one sees you,__  
__but sometimes I do,__  
__and that sight becomes my art_

**\- Rumi**

**III**

The next night he did not come out, but she could feel him standing in the shadows at the lip of the opening.

Like the tentative flicker of one more, barely noticeable star in the night sky, his presence hovered beyond the slate, beckoning her, the way the stained leaves of a leather-bound diary once had.

In the privacy of her head, Ginny smiled wide and free, and she did not know why.

Opening her mouth, she let the wary caution of a thousand warnings weave through, and disappear, in the tentative cadence of words.

Her voice floated softly across the dense emptiness between them, beginning a climb over the generations-old walls that held him up. With halting, harmless words, she tossed her stones to measure the depth of the plummeting walls, silently falling onto the distant, lined roofs below them, between them.

She told him about the forest, a safe topic, and other little nothings that she could spare throwing into the chasm- in case they should cross. With those tumbling words, she forged a leash of her own: spinning, and flexing; gaining strength and whipping through the tangible cold like a rope.

Her voice never rose from a whisper and sometimes her hair would flow around her, and hide the corners of her eyes that sought for him.

But, resisting the tickling temptation in her fingers, she would not bind it, or brush it away. Like the roaring bonfire of one stranded on an island, Ginny used its blaze to call him out to her.

He started coming every night, but ashamed of every little mask, every little dance, song and act that he had to stage in the day, he hid in the shadows.

She spoke, and he felt the manacles on his feet give a sharp tug. His muscles coiled under his clammy skin, ready to turn, ready to step away, change his mind, go back, go away and escape the words before they took meaning. But a dormant will in his soul seemed to roll in its sleep, hand fastening around the reigns, and refusing his limbs the authority to act.

Confused at first by his own unexplainable behavior, Draco secretly felt the shame blossoming in him at being trapped by the common beauty of a Weasley. He wondered at his vanity, and when his standards had dropped so low, but the sentiment fell uncomfortably on his conscience, and Draco felt even more baffled.

The years of animosity sat like poison in his veins, chilling him in the mild air, probing his mind for answers as he battled with himself about leaving.

But her voice, faint and intermittently cut off, curled around the constant, scaly anger inside him, and soothed it like lapping waves over jagged stone. If he had to do what he was assigned, then he needed this catharsis.

Draco continued to stay, returning night after night. Even when there were too many students in the common room, their questioning, plotting eyes following him to the door, he came. Even when he passed her by in the halls during the day, laughing as Goyle bumped into her, sprawling her books all over the stones—

"_Fuck off, Malfoy."_

"_Watch it, Weasel, or there will be _10 points off Gryffindor_… Oh, did I just do that?"_

"_And yet we're _still _leading Slytherin in points…" _

At night, the countless defenses, excuses and glittering badges of hollow pride rust and strip away, pulling on him like a fallen angel in need of salvation, to crawl up the steps, one way or another, to see her on her tower once more.

Like this, slowly the agitation and embitterment began to loosen, and an even stranger exhilaration began to take its place.

Like an invalid learning to walk again, Draco allowed the liberation to sink in with small steps. Someday, perhaps, he would question it, but in his hopeful and naive unconscious, Draco hoped that by then he would have learned to dance.

For now, it did not matter.

For now, it was enough that he had one secret to covet from his father.

And when it ceased to matter, his gaze became more daring. As time crept past, it flitted over to her perched seat more resolutely.

Her vision calmed him and thrilled him.

As he watched her from where she could not see, a silent wind tossed and looped in the folds of her hair, and tried to carry her speech across; the words, reaching him only in flaky wisps: full of dearth and unconscious caresses. Draco felt his heart strum feebly, inside him.

All that she threw, he watched bouncing in the sparkling, dewy slate of the ledge. He did not catch any of her attempts, and stepped always a little away when they reached too close.

But when the azure breath of the sleepless hours brought him the scent of her hair, he leaned out, the watery light of the moon touching his nose and chin. And, a dying man, he drank from the air.

One day, she noticed him at the Slytherin table during breakfast. There was no one in the whole hall that was paying him any attention, and as he idly played with the fork between his fingers, across the tables, she saw _him _come alive.

Ginny blinked.

A clear, phantom scent of the night sky brushed her nose, then, and Ginny stopped eating to stare, her heart filled with wonder.

It was a flash of sparkling silver in his hands that had caught her attention. But immediately after looking, Ginny found herself distracted by the much quieter sparkle of hoary shutters falling, as something cold and formidable slipped away from his unusual eyes. Lying unassumingly before him, and subjected to his ashen scrutiny was a folded slip of paper, hanging precariously from the edge of his plate.

The fork in his hand twirled smoothly on the dark green tablecloth and Draco stared on.

Ginny wished she could reach out into his thoughts. Peering at the clear eyes, so much brighter, so much harder to see in the daylight, Ginny wished that she could step through their clarity, and feel all the little breaks and flaws just beyond.

Ginny felt her head tilt to the side, and something above her diaphragm clenched twice, leaving a dull aching in its wake. Seeing him so tarnished, with the cry lodged so plainly behind his eyes, Ginny had to bite her lips to keep from letting the soft words pushing against the back of her throat from coming out.

The moving fork in his hands caught at one corner of the folded parchment and there was a clatter as his fingers let go immediately, as if they would burn. Ginny looked up just in time to catch his lids widening- just barely, before his gaze flickered up, and met hers, and then the heads nearby were turning, inquiring-.

Ginny did her best to not look away from the naked wretchedness of his gaze. She wished she could reach out and draw a hand down over his lids.

_Don't look at me like that. _

Then a sly, white hand appeared; sliding long, red-tipped fingers on his shoulder, over the rounded, tense bend and down his arm.

Ginny's breath hitched, the movement so sensual that a prickling heat enflamed her cheeks.

Ginny blinked, willing herself to look away. When she opened her eyes, she found herself staring into the flat greys of a seventh year Slytherin whom she barely knew.

The first time he had caught her, he fervently wished he hadn't. It was so much harder climbing the endless stairs, heading for the astronomy tower night after night, when he could no longer pretend that she didn't know. That she watched him through his ridiculous deceits, every day, and simply humored him.

He did not know what he had hoped. That she would not recognize who her midnight visitor was during the day? That she would dismiss it for a night-time delusion?

That she would not know that he stood there, behind the tiled opening, every night, even though she chose to speak to him?

That…

_No._

Draco firmly closed the door to that particular closet shut. It did not matter what he hoped.

All that mattered was that she _knew_. And unlike him, she obviously had no qualms about their little charade, and, it suddenly occurred to him, _nor was she likely to, since making peace with those morally inferior to them is the ultimate Gryffindor dream_. Feeling a surge of anger, Draco felt the corner of his lip curl in distaste.

And there he was, every night just filling her with charitable joy.

But then he remembered her serene gaze from across the table, sitting in the midst of all of her fellow Gryffindors, looking just as alone as she did on her perch against the night sky, and Draco felt a twinge of shame.

He had been in the Great Hall for breakfast that morning. A letter from his father neatly folded before him. His mind had been on the substance of his hopes that he could not give words to. Closing his eyes against the gaiety around him, he had peeled open the letter.

The parchment showed blank at first before the familiar green ink crawled across its surface.

_Draco, _it began, and he felt a twinge in his arm. His hand closed around the fork on the table.

_Time is wasting, and we are still waiting. _Draco could hear the threat, but he was used to these reminders. Then:

_I want a full report of your progress. My messenger will visit you in a fortnight. _

_L.V.M. _

He stared at the letter, refusing to read the words of warning twice, and waited for its edges to curl up and hiss with its enchanted flame. But instead the ink began to travel inwards to the center of the parchment, and there was a dizzying swirl of green before it coagulated into the form of a skull.

L.V.M. Lucius Vàclav Malfoy, or Lord Voldemort?

A piercing pain shot through the mark in his arm, as if the coiling snake was stretching his very skin with its movement- he should not have read the letter in such a public place. The fork he had been holding slipped and clattered. Draco's eyes shot up.

And there she was.

The green imprint of his father's treacherous words was still burning behind his eyes. His knees below the table had been shaking, and biting the inside of his cheek, Draco willed the masses of droning students around him to not notice. Only for a moment. And in that intense suspension of time, he held onto that curious brown gaze, while he scrambled to recollect himself.

Through the cloud of pain, the hovering imprint of the Death Mark shadowed her face. Brown eyes peered at him through a green skull mask. 

As if hearing a summons, he had felt Pansy shift in her seat beside him. Fighting the coil around his throat, Draco willed himself to breathe. He heard the sugary voice change direction as her head turned, and through sheer spontaneity of habit, the forlorn, sagging muscles of his face had tightened up, and lifted. The false hauteur returned in the form of an imperceptible pull on the corner of his mouth, a slight drooping of his lids, and like a flood, the courage spawned by relief infused the rigid muscles of his face once more.

Heart thumping in chest, Draco braced himself as Pansy's heavily scented hand lifted from her side and landing on the sensitive base of his spine, snaking its way up- candy voice still speaking-

"...Draco, darling, don't you quite agree? I really think this is the first time Goyle has come up with anything worth hearing…"

And then the hand had slid over his shoulder and gave a very small, but very intentional squeeze, her nails digging painfully into his flesh, and he swallowed, tying the loose ends of his mask firmly into place, and finally looked up.

Stunned brown eyes stared from over the huddled benches, across the Great Hall. They were not looking at him, but the grazing long fingers stroking his upper arm. Gut twisting, Draco wondered if, from the distance, she could see the glinting ring on the white finger.

Fighting to keep his breathing as regular as possible under the scrutiny of his peers, as they turned one by one, awaiting his reply, he wondered if she could see the engraved _M, _shimmering just below the diamond.

Desperate to detect any change in her expression, Draco wondered since when it had started to matter if she did.

Below untamed, angry hair, her calm brown eyes blinked. When she opened them again, they looked straight back at him.

Meeting her gaze at last, Draco fought a cramp in his chest.

_It didn't, _he told himself again_, _bringing the shutters down.

Caught up in her own thoughts, she did not manage to look away fast enough, and before she had blinked the dark orifices away again, Draco managed to catch a brewing stain of hurt dawning behind them.

Wrenching his own gaze away in a sudden, suffocating plunge of panic, Draco turned to his fellow Slytherins at last, plastering on an arrogant, dirty smile on his cracking face, and opened his mouth.

Behind drawling words, and a stiff, scornful mask, his little lying heart insisted: _it didn't, it didn't._

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